Chrissy Murderbot - Women's Studies

Sick of footwork yet? It's not fair to dismiss an entire scene based around the endless gimmickry and outside appropriation it has inspired, but either way, reservations about the pseudo-genre shouldn't get in the way of Chrissy Murderbot's fantastic debut album for Planet Mu. No, Murderbot isn't a footwork producer—this is the man who was making ragga jungle only a few years ago, mind—and Women's Studies isn't quite a footwork album. It's an more

Chrissy Murderbot Women's Studies

It's really hard to know how to begin to describe Chrissy Murderbot, or his third album, Women's Studies. The Chicago-based artist is a virtual walking encyclopedia of the last 30 years of dance music, but this album is about choice quotes rather than sample overload. On "Under Dress," housey horn stabs from 1986 are paired with slack-talk princess Warrior Queen. "Pelvic Floor" features piano-house chords from 1992 with dancehall MC Rubi Dan riding a more

Boxcutter: The Dissolve

Boxcutter’s last album Arecibo Message showed the Northern Irish producer move away from the punishing dubstep structures of his first two records and let the influences that used to eat away at the edges of his half-step fully fly, but the album’s resulting unfocused sprawl felt counter-intuitive. His fourth, The Dissolve, begins with hesitant shuffling before bursting out into streaks of neon-dyed funk in ‘Panama’, and its exaggerated more

The Dissolve

Back in 2006, Northern Irish producer Boxcutter’s debut album, Oneiric, was lumped into the then-nascent dubstep genre, despite the fact that Barry Lynn’s music was only slightly redolent of the atmospheres and stylistic tendencies of that particular strand of U.K. garage. Sure, there was a slight coloration of two-step beats and urbane synth flourishes here and there, but Oneiric (and indeed its follow-up, Glyphic) owed more to Autechre and more